There are few sentences more calculated to freeze the blood of a grown-up theatre-goer than “we’ve got a large school party in”. But it is the season of school parties, and so I became an ungainly Gulliver in a vast audience of excited Lilliputians.

Erica Whyman’s adaptation of Mary Norton’s classic children’s story is her farewell to the Northern Stage, where she has been artistic director and chief executive since 2005. She joins the Royal Shakespeare Company as deputy to the newly appointed artistic director, Gregory Doran.

Norton’s Carnegie Medal-winning story about a family of tiny people who live under the floorboards of a large house, and survive by “borrowing” small useful items (which is why you can never find a pair of nail scissors when you need them) has endured several wayward attempts at adaptation.

But Charles Way’s graceful stage version treats Norton’s text with respect, and Andrew Stephenson’s designs draw wittily on the odd proportions and sense of fragility of Diana Stanley’s original illustrations.

Whyman reinforces the sense of menace that haunts her characters with ingenious use of puppets to mirror the horror of the actors playing the Borrower family - Pod, Homily and their daughter Arrietty - as their floorboard “roof” is jemmied up and their home exposed to the pitiless gaze of their nemesis, the spiteful housekeeper Mrs Driver (Bev Fox).

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This is a production that makes considerable demands on its audience: the story tells of fear, the loss of a home, and a terrifying journey into the unknown. The set and costumes, though beautiful, are muted in tone, while the score by Sam Kenyon is spare and occasionally dissonant.

Frances McNamee is engaging as Arrietty, and Tom Walton gives a performance of antic malevolence as the handyman, Crampful. But Karen Traynor as Homily is shouty rather than audible and Adrian Garratt oddly charmless as the rustic Borrower, Spiller.

If I had seen the show with a mainly grown-up audience, I might have wondered whether it was the sort of thing that grown-ups think children ought to like, rather than something children would choose for themselves.

But I would have been wrong. The very young audience was captivated from the start: they laughed at the jokes, maintained a tense silence in the scary bits, and the audible sigh of wonder at the twinkling stars of Arrietty’s very first night under the open sky was enough to bring tears to the eyes.